Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain by Amanda E. Herbert (review)

In her debut monograph Amanda Herbert explores and celebrates female friendship in early modern Britain. Attractively written, sensitive, and perceptive in its analysis, Herbert’s book draws on a wide range of unpublished letters and diaries and makes a valuable contribution to its field. “Early modern” is a flexible term, and Herbert has chosen to focus on the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The female alliances under investigation, she explains, are also largely restricted to the world of elite women. Only in this milieu and this period do we have the wealth of rich personal sources on which to base such a study. Herbert makes a convincing case for the profound importance of female friendship in the lives of women. While she acknowledges that relationships could also be fractious, her source materials, especially long-term epistolary exchanges, have an in-built positive tendency. That may be a helpful corrective; much recent work on female interaction, drawing on ecclesiastical court records from a slightly earlier period, has been led by its sources to focus primarily on conflict and control. Herbert’s book takes the form of six thematic chapters. The first, on the “idioms and languages of female alliances,” explores how women understood and expressed friendship by drawing on religious, classical, and medical texts, and on the guidelines spelled out in conduct books. These, of course, presented an ideal that was prescriptive rather than descriptive. In correspondence, women might well try to live up to those ideals; face-to-face, many contemporary commentators remarked tartly, relationships were often characterized by emulation and friction.

One of Herbert’s key themes is that elite women were often able to sustain very close friendships with soul-mates and close female kin over many years and great distances. These were epistolary friendships periodically reinforced by personal or family visits. Letters were by no means the only form of contact. The second chapter focuses on the exchange of gifts, and their significance. Women’s gifts, naturally enough, were gendered and carried a range of meanings. There were perfumes, preserves, pictures, and elaborate embroidered gifts, all valued primarily for the skill and labor a dear sister or friend had invested in their creation. In a subtle analysis, Herbert explains how the commendable qualities of skill and taste served to cancel out any negative associations with luxuriousness.

The third chapter explores a different kind of alliance: the “cooperative labor” of elite women developing and sharing recipes (medical, culinary, and cosmetic), and of an elite mistress and her servants in the work of the household and domestic production. Herbert makes good use here of elite inventories and illustrated prescriptive texts such as Hannah Woolley’s Compleat Servant-Maid to describe a world in which employers and employees “shared working relationships and together shouldered the burdens of gendered domestic responsibilities” (89). Domestic management was a key responsibility for elite women, and many took great satisfaction in their skills, but the flavor here is somewhat idealized. A wealth of other evidence, by contemporaries such as Daniel Defoe, points to the tensions often found within these domestic relationships, and the rapid and often acrimonious turnover of domestic staff in elite and upper-middling households (like that of Elizabeth Pepys, for example) tells a rather different story.

The fourth chapter provides an enjoyable and persuasive analysis of the significance of spas for female visitors in this period. Most studies of spas have focused on the Georgian period, but as Herbert shows they already held an important place in elite lives in the early modern period. While spas attracted both men and women, many of the leisure activities there were homosocial, with women seizing the opportunity to renew friendships with other women.

The final two chapters take a different turn. One explores the world of Quaker women pursuing a “public ministry,” that is, feeling called to undertake evangelical preaching missions...